Vegan Keto: Day 4

so it’s been an interesting few days! The hardest part of this whole keto thing is mental. truly i crave pasta and chips and popcorn like 24/7. so this is really hard for me and i find myself constantly thinking “is this right for me? should i even try this? i should probably just give up because it’s not the right style of eating for me.” but then i remember how good i’ve been feeling in the afternoons… like better than i did when i was doing my elimination diet! my PM sleepiness isn’t really there right now. normally around 2PM i get exhausted and want more coffee. i also start feeling bloated no matter what i ate that day (or the day before). it was even happening during my three weeks of cutting out soy, gluten, sugar, corn, etc.

So maybe there’s something to this whole keto thing?

I don’t know for sure- i also got acupuncture so maybe that helped too? who knows.

all i know is i realllllly want to try to stick this out as long as i can. i know next week there’s a 0% chance i’ll stay keto because i’m going to be in chicago at all sorts of holiday festivities. my goal is to eat as keto as possible as much of the time as possible and to work out as hard as possible every morning to try to burn off that extra glucose.

so i’ve been eating a LOT of oil. like more than i have in years. probably in the last week i’ve had more oil than i’ve had (at home) in the past year.

BUT i still have that nagging voice in the back of my head reciting everything i’ve learned about nutrition and fat over the last six years of being vegan (i turned into a nutrition fanatic) and it tells me “fat is bad for you” “saturated fat will kill you” “even if you lose weight you’re going to get heart disease” “the fat you eat is the fat you wear”. I have to constantly remind myself that nutrition science is changing constantly and while all of that might be true, it also might not be. and for every study you find that proves that saturated fat is linked to heart disease you can find a study that proves it doesn’t. so basically i have no idea what is true and what isn’t.

what i did find are a ton of articles that further confuse and educate me and thought i’d share here for anyone else that’s experiencing the same confusion i am, anyone just curious about it, and also to keep a place to store all the crap i’m finding!!

(side note on my thoughts on the mediterranean diet: does the diet work because of the fat or in spite of the fat?)

i’m trying really hard to open my mind to the possibility that something may be true here… it’s hard because it goes against literally everything i’ve thought or promoted for the last six years. it directly contradicts what i thought i knew. and maybe it’s all wrong and biased. maybe it’s just the oil industry and meat industries trying to say “hey… eat us again! we’re not that bad!” but maybe it’s not so scandalous and it’s just true? i have no idea.

i’m going to continue this study of ONE (that’s me) and see how i continue to feel. if it just stresses me out to eat this way then it’s not worth it, right? if it’s not sustainable for me, it’s def not the right thing for me. but i’m gonna stick it out for a few weeks as much as possible and see what happens. i don’t think three weeks of eating fat will kill me! hahaha

the moral of the story: sugar will kill you no matter what! high fat low carb, high carb low fat, low calorie… sugar is just bad. now if only it didn’t taste so good…. sigh.

and here’s the thing. i can pick and choose all the articles i want that show the point i’m trying to make. but that’s just one side of the story. my brain is definitely more math/science leaning but the reason i chose math over science is that math is black and white. 1+1 =2 always. you can write a proof that will show you why the squares of the sides of a right triangle always equals the square of the hypotenuse of that triangle. but in science i would rig all my experiments to get the results i wanted. sure… there were no peer reviews. nobody watching what i was doing. but i knew what the experiment was supposed to prove so i would make the experiment prove it. i’m not saying that all the studies are bad and the scientists are just out to prove whatever preconceived beliefs they have. but maybe they are. or the interpretations of the data are in the eyes of the beholder. so when someone says “a non-vegan diet is the healthiest!” i’m like “here are 70 studies on why you’re wrong”. but that’s just because i choose to eat a vegan diet because i love animals. the health benefits are controversial at best. of course a vegan diet is better than the standard american diet. but could a diet with some animal protein also be the healthiest diet? maybe. i honestly can’t say 100% that it’s not. i don’t think anyone can say with 100% certainty either way. people get soooo fired up about it but the truth is we don’t know for sure. and can i say with 100% certainty that a vegan diet is the best choice for 100% of people in the world? of course not. now i’m rambling. but hopefully you get what i’m trying to say here!

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